Science Fiction Studies

#7 = Volume 2, Part 3 = November 1975

John Huntington

Public and Private Imperatives in Le Guin's Novels

The typical Le Guin hero is a visitor to a world other than his own;
sometimes he is a professional anthropologist; sometimes the role is forced on
him; in all cases he is a creature of divided allegiance. As a student of an
alien society, he has responsibilities to his own culture and to the culture he
visits; he must sympathize with and participate deeply in both, for it is by the
experience and analysis of their differences that he hopes to arrive at a deeper
understanding of the nature and possibilities of mind and of social
organization. In his role of scientist, the anthropologist expects cultural
division and has been trained to explore it; but as an individual, he finds that
his personal attachments exist to an important degree independent of and at
times in conflict with his social duty, so that, almost inevitably in Le Guin's
work, he finds that he has difficulty reconciling his public, political
obligations with the bonds he has developed as a private individual. Though the
cultural division often serves to exacerbate his dilemma, Le Guin's hero, as a
moral individual rather than as a scientist, often confronts a universal human
problem of—in bald terms—how to harmonize love and public duty. The two
divisions the anthropologist hero faces are not completely separate, however;
different societies demand and deserve different sacrifices. Therefore, the
inquiry into what the individual owes society leads naturally into a study of
the nature and possibilities of different political structures.

The political axis of Le Guin's work exists at right angles, if you will, to
the powerful vision of unity that recent criticism has been exploring, and an
accurate perception of her whole achievement requires us to engage both
dimensions. While the recent popularity of her work derives in part, one
expects, from the vision of unity, it also probably owes much to her exploration
of political issues that have developed a particular urgency over the last ten
years: to her attempt, increasingly precise and detailed, to use SF for studying
problems that arose from the United States' use of military power in Vietnam and
from the experience of an alienating and technologically bloated economic
system. Douglas Barbour's study of the relation of Le Guin's novels to the
Tao-te
ching points to an aspiration towards unified being that underlies all the
novels.1 We need to recognize, however, how the structure of a novel
like The Left Hand of Darkness (LHD), by dividing the moral universe into
public and private worlds, frustrates unity and turns what might have become
ecstatic perceptions and energies into an awareness of tragic incompleteness. It
is this failure to achieve a unity the imagery seems to promise which probably
accounts for the frustration David Ketterer experiences in LHD and which he
attributes to a discontinuity between the mythic theme of the novel and its
plot.2 In the light of Le Guin's recurrent political interest we can
see that the discontinuity experienced serves an important thematic function and
expresses an ironic perception of the difficult relation of the private
individual to the public world in which he acts. In her early novels this
perception gives heightened value to the unified heroic act. But in LHD the
awareness of the incongruity between the public and private worlds interrupts
the full "mythic" triumph, and in two works published after LHD we can
see Le Guin stretching this tension between the public and private worlds to
such a pitch that one or the other of the two poles has had to give way. In her
latest novel, The Dispossessed (TD), she breaks through to a new
definition of the problem. In order to appreciate the accomplishment of TD,
however, we have to understand the problem defined and confronted in the earlier
novels.

In Le Guin's early novels there is usually an element of irony inherent in
the heroic activity, for public action demands the sacrifice of a private bond.
The success of the heroic quest entails personal loss. This theme is given an
explicit, fairy tale concreteness in Rocannon's World (RW) when Rocannon
makes a contract to give what he holds "dearest and would least willingly
give" in return for public victory (§8).3 In this early novel
the conflict between the public triumph and private loss does not pose an
ethical problem but serves to give contour to the heroic idea: we can admire the
hero because he has made sacrifices and, importantly, because it is implicit
that he—and the author—see more to life than just public victory. A hero
without such awareness becomes either pompously comic (Superman) or sinister
(Conan). In RW the reconciliation of the public and private imperatives is
rendered fairly easy, however, by the unambiguous clarity and urgency of the
political issue. The "enemy," the Faradayans, have no redeeming
qualities; they are seen from a great distance and their acts reveal them to be
brutal imperialists and terrorists, so that the private sacrifices necessary,
however painful, seem a small price to pay for their defeat. Though Rocannon has
moments of doubt—when he thinks he has failed he questions the value of the
whole enterprise, and when the enemy is obliterated he is appalled at the death
of a thousand men (§9)—these suggestions of moral complexity do not really
undermine his heroic act; in fact, like his sacrifice of Mogien, his doubt gives
his activity moral value; without these qualifications he might seem merely a
butcher.

LHD attains a more difficult balance of public and private imperatives, for
this later novel does not offer the earlier one's clear-cut public justification
for private sacrifice. The two political systems of Gethen, Karhide's feudal one
and Orgoreyn's totalitarian-collectivist one, are both corrupt and destructive
of individual values, and if the feudal is favored over the totalitarian it is
only because it is the more flexible and the more easily influenced of the two;
its inefficiency is its virtue. We find no neat distinction available between
the good and bad political systems; Genly Ai faces no absolute enemy against
whom any act is permitted or sacrifice justified. Also, Ai's goal of persuading
Gethen to join the Ekumen lacks the element of urgent crisis that sanctions
Rocannon's public acts. In fact, it is important to Ai's mission that there be
no public compulsion that would make Gethen's decision to join seem anything
less than completely voluntary.

While the public world of LHD exerts a diminished moral imperative, in the
intimacy that develops between Ai and Estraven the private world assumes an
importance and value that has no equal in any of Le Guin's other novels. The
conventional plot carries the public values while behind it, in a separate set
of events, the private values develop. Thus, the bond the two alien beings
establish on the Gobrin Ice, especially the "bespeaking," has enormous
personal significance but does not directly influence political events. There
are, then, in effect, two sub-plots to the novel. One is the adventure which,
like Rocannon's, leads to political success; the other is the love story of Ai
and Estraven. To be sure, a thematic coherence bridges these two plots: insofar
as the political problem in the novel involves overcoming the fear of aliens,4
the love story depicts the successful healing of that division between beings.
This theme of union is repeated on a more general level by the androgyny of the
Gethenians which offers a pervasive image of the union of the primary opposition
experienced among humans.5 But though they share common themes, the
two sub-plots also move in opposite directions: in the love story Ai begins
suspicious of Estraven and learns to trust him; in the political story he begins
naively trusting both King Argaven and the Commensals of Orgoreyn and learns to
suspect them and be cunning. The main challenge to the suggestions of coherence,
however, comes from the death of Estraven, for it points to the gap that
continues to exist between the public and the private worlds. Ai finally pays
for public success with private loss, and at the end of the novel Le Guin makes
us face the disjunction between the two worlds by having Ai force Argaven's
hand, but at the cost of breaking the vow he made to Estraven that he would see
him pardoned before he brought the ship down.

The Karhidish tale of "Estraven the traitor" serves as an ironic
paradigm for the discrepancy between the public and private worlds: in the tale,
love ultimately settles a political dispute, but at the cost of the murder of
one of the lovers and the branding of the offspring of the lovers' union with
the title of traitor. Ai and Estraven reenact the tale and transpose it
from the primitive political level of a feud between neighboring families to the
more complex level of international politics. In both the tale and the larger
world of the novel, traitor becomes an honorific title, thus pointing to
the inability of the political terminology to deal with true value.6
But at the very end of the novel Le Guin prevents us from settling down easily
with such an ironic view: Ai, speaking to Estraven's father and son, says "Therem
was no traitor. What does it matter what fools call him?" To which the
father replies, "It matters." One cannot escape the significance of
the public world's blind destructiveness simply by ignoring it.

In its structure, therefore, LHD balances public achievement against personal
cost, and Le Guin, dismissing neither, maintains the dialectical tension between
them. In two works published since LHD she explores the problem further by
upsetting the balance between the two worlds. In The Lathe of Heaven (LoH)
all public activity leads to failure, and the novel, almost dogmatically,
asserts the total primacy of private, inner peace.7 Dr. Haber, the
scientist who envisions creating a better world, turns out to be the villain,
and George Orr, the protagonist whose private dreams change the world, spends
the novel trying to relinquish this power. Orr makes things happen, but he is
incompetent to predict the consequences of his acts, and the novel makes it
clear that such incompetence is inevitable, that given man's ignorance, any
public act is liable to do wrong, no matter how well intentioned. But if in LoH
Le Guin upsets the balance in favor of passivity and inner peace, in "The
Word for World is Forest," she upsets it in the opposite direction and
argues8 for the precedence of the public duty over the private one.
In this novella the pressure of political events forces Selver, the alien
protagonist, to become an active terrorist and guerrilla in spite of his deep
sense of the value of private bonds. In order to free his people from the
imperialist tyranny of humans, Selver does not merely lose his friend, a human,
he participates in his murder. In the hands of a less honest writer than Le Guin,
Selver's extraordinary spirituality might be made to counterbalance
sentimentally the pitiless brutality of his political acts, but "The Word
for World is Forest" (WWF) does not evade the rigors of the moral question;
it studies the savagery of guerrilla warfare and accepts it.9 The
story clearly asserts that the private world can flourish only when the public
world is benign, that when the public world becomes oppressive the private world
must give way.

In all her work Le Guin probes in various ways for the point at which the
public and private imperatives intersect, for the act that will allow them to be
unified, if only momentarily. Put in the context of this search, it is clear
that the split in attention that Ketterer notes in LHD has the important
function of carrying one of the major conflicts of the novel, and whatever
discontinuity we experience in terms of plot and theme expresses exactly that
discontinuity which is being explored between the values of the public and the
private worlds. LHD stands apart from Le Guin's other works, however, in its
extraordinary balance and its commitment to both of the rival imperatives. The
public world of the novel is neither so overpoweringly meaningful that (as in RW)
it can easily and indubitably compensate for private loss, nor so arbitrary that
(as in LoH) it can be treated as morally trivial. By observing this dialectical
balance we can see how far Le Guin differs from an absurdist like Vonnegut who,
while he too sees a discrepancy between the two worlds, in much of his work
cheerfully dismisses the public world to its insane and pompous self-destruction.
LHD renders a basic allegiance to private, humane values without denying the
degree to which public, institutional values influence and limit the private
ones.

The balance Le Guin achieves in this novel is not a complacent one; it is
precarious and leads to serious questions about man's social obligations. LHD
marks the beginning of a period in which Le Guin, while always sympathetic to
the private world, has pursued these social questions and has become
increasingly concerned to anatomize the political structures of the public world
which so powerfully affects the private. As a rule she has modeled her fictional
public world on familiar western social institutions. In her earlier novels
social organizations, with the important exception of primitive ones, are not
explored in specific detail. If they appear at all, they do so in symbolic forms—as
in the city of the "Winged Ones" in RW (§6)—or as vague and
abstract structures like the Ekumen. The city of Es Toch in City of Illusions
is an SF convention and has no true political structure. LHD breaks with this
essentially literary vision of the political world by treating the
destructiveness of Orgoreyn and Karhide as a function of their political
organizations. The antagonism of both nations to the private world represented
by Ai and Estraven's love is not simply a given; it derives from the nature of
power and from the specific mechanisms of the nations' governments. Though
Karhide's feudal monarchy owes a good deal to literary convention, it is
realized with a detail and with a care for the way politics works in this
archaic system which is new to Le Guin. And Orgoreyn, with its prison camps and
its tyrannic bureaucracies, is clearly an explicit version of one form of the
modern, collectivist nation-state. Thus, Le Guin's work, while it has always had
an important political element, now begins to examine the failure of specific
political structures to give play and sustenance to private values and desires.
The romance quest of Rocannon gives way to a more pessimistic vision in which
the protagonist seeks, not for victory, but for meaning and value itself in the
face of a dominant and alienating public context. This tendency to treat the
public world in terms of known and explicit models becomes even more pronounced
after LHD. In LoH, set in Le Guin's home city of Portland, Oregon, and WWF, in
which Selver fights an organization that is compared to the U.S. Army in
Vietnam, Le Guin depicts the alienating public world as the
capitalist-imperialist world of the modern U.S.A.

In spite of the fact that her analysis of the public world has become more
specific and more contemporary, Le Guin has continued through this period to
envision a primitive economy as the main salvation from the modern,
technological, imperialist state. Her heroes usually discover in the primitive
cultures they visit values and parapsychological powers which, in one way or
another, sustain rather than contradict the private world. But in all cases this
primitive unity, while it holds out possibilities for meaningful and integrated
social life, is vulnerable to outside threats. Even the primitive sages, whose
spiritual accomplishments might seem to allow them to avoid the political
dilemma altogether, must step out of the retired life and in one way or another
confront the complex and generally destructive public world. Kyo aids Rocannon;
Faxe leaves his mountain fastness and enters Karhide politics; Selver becomes a
general. But, as Le Guin's vision of the public world changes, this act of
commitment to the public world assumes different consequences; what in Kyo's and
Faxe's cases is a generous and ennobling act, in Selver's entails a spiritual
self-mutilation. For Selver to lose part of his wholeness, even for a brief
while, changes him permanently; he cannot, as Kyo apparently expects to do,
regain primitive innocence at will. WWF, therefore, differs significantly from
RW and even from LHD in its perception of the corrupting power of the
technological imperialism that threatens the primitive world. Kyo and Rocannon
can fight the Faradayans without being tainted, but for Selver to fight his
human enemies is, to some extent, to become like them. Thus, the invasion motif,
such a staple of SF, begins to take on an important new aspect in Le Guin's
hands: the threat is not simply conquest, it is the corruption of the primitive
innocence, the violation of spiritual wholeness by the presence of insanely
powerful and greedy forces that have no vision at all of a life in which private
and public imperatives are truly in harmony.

So long as the options for social life and action are limited to a physically
rich but fragile primitivism and a crudely powerful but spiritually destitute
technology, there would seem to be no escape from private tragedy and no
possibility of truly voluntary and ethical public action. Le Guin's new novel, The
Dispossessed, however, sets up what is for her a new definition of the
political problem and thus offers a way out of the bind represented by the
modern-primitive conflict of her middle period. In this latest novel Le Guin has
focused entirely on modern political systems (or possible systems) and has
studied them without the nostalgia for the primitive and the parapsychological
machinery that constitute the alternatives to the modern state in her earlier
novels. Furthermore the racial differences that in all of her earlier works
parallel but also dilute the more explicit political theme have been abandoned.
TD differs from earlier Le Guin novels in seeing the private world almost
totally as a function of specific political systems. The intimate bonds which in
her early novels exist apart from any social organization and often in spite of
society and which represent an absolute source of value, are here seen as
inherently conditioned by the shape of the society. What is in LHD conceived of
as a problem of dialectical conflict between two sources of value, love and
society, has been transformed into a conflict between two forms of society,
anarchist and capitalist, and the question is, not what does the individual owe
to society, but what kind of society makes possible valid human bonds? And just
as the vision of the political world has been reshaped, the vision of love, of
the valid bond itself, has changed. From the vantage of TD we can see how much
the valued private bonds of the earlier works, those between Rocannon and Mogien,
Ai and Estraven, are rich expressions, not of man as a social animal, but of man
alone in a hostile nature. It is significant that the love of Ai and Estraven
reaches its height, not in society, but in the utter desolation of the Gobrin
Ice. The failure of the public and private worlds to coalesce, therefore, may be
in part the fault of an idea of love that does not allow for a social dimension.
Thus, as Le Guin has made the political issues more precise and detailed, she
has forced an analysis of the specific political systems themselves, which has,
in turn, led her to a reinterpretation of the source of value of the private
world. TD is important because, though it generates its own ambivalances and
problems, it renews the possibilities for viable social action.

3. In City of Illusions this trade is put in terms of two aspects of a
single individual: "To revive Ramarren you must kill Falk" (§8). Falk
finally evades the sacrifice, however, by rigging a way of preserving his
Falkian memory when he becomes Ramarren.

4. Fear of the alien is a common source of political problems in Le Guin's
early and middle work, and she tends to envision some kind of solution in loving
the "other." The complement of this idea in her work is the idea that
without otherness there can be no love, only narcissism. Her most concise study
of this problem is the short story "Nine Lives."

5. Even the members of the ten-person clone in "Nine Lives,"
identical in all other ways, admit sexual division.

6. A "traitor" is not only one who loves the "other," he
is also one who is not aggressive in his country's interest. Estraven is exiled
for failing to prosecute the Sinoth Valley border dispute. The antithesis of a
traitor is a patriot: Estraven defines patriotism as "fear of the
other" (§1).

7. We should note that, just as the novel devalues public activity, the
private bond between Orr and Heather Lelache is treated more ambivalently than
are those between the heroic aliens in the "Hainish" novels. The
private "way" that Orr seeks to follow is therefore significantly
different from the kind of private love-bond that gives meaning to the lives of
Ai and Rocannon.

8. I use this word on purpose. In her "Afterword" to the story in Again,
Dangerous Visions, Le Guin notes, somewhat apologetically, the conscious
moralism of the tale.

9. The toughness of "The Word for World is Forest" is evident if we
put it next to Rocannon's World. The central event of both works is a
guerrilla attack against an imperialist occupation, and in terms of body count
the two are very similar. But the enemy in RW is unseen and alien, and all
friends are on the "good" side, while in "The Word for World is
Forest" we, the human race, are the enemy, and Selver's close friend, Raj
Lyubov, is a human. There are no easy answers in the later story.

ABSTRACT

The typical Le Guin hero is a visitor to a world other
than his own. Sometimes he is a professional anthropologist; sometimes the role is forced
on him: in all cases, he is a creature of divided allegiance. As a student of an alien
society, he has responsibilities to his own culture and to the culture he visits; he must
sympathize with and participate deeply in both, for it is by the experience and analysis
of their differences that he hopes to arrive at a deeper understanding of the nature and
possibilities of the mind and of social organization. In his role as scientist, the
anthropologist expects cultural division and has been trained to explore it, but as an
individual, he finds that his personal attachments exist to an important degree
independent of and at times in conflict with his social duty. Almost inevitably in Le
Guins work, the hero finds that he has difficulty reconciling his public, political
obligation with the bonds he has developed as a private individual. Though the cultural
division often serves to exacerbate his dilemma, Le Guins hero, as a moral
individual rather than as a scientist, often confronts a human problem of, in bald terms,
how to harmonize love and public duty. The two divisions the anthropologist hero faces are
not completely separate, however: different societies demand and deserve different
sacrifices. Therefore, the inquiry into what the individual owes society leads naturally
into a study of the nature and possibilities of different political structures. Among the
works discussed are Rocannons World, City of Illusions, The Left Hand of
Darkness, The Dispossessed, The Lathe of Heaven, and "The Word for
World is Forest."